Heads or Tails
by Midnight Saki
Summary: It was so unique to find someone, that in this world, wanted to live. Uchiha Sasuke had spent so much of his life pondering the singularity of death that he didn't even notice when she began to teach him about living. Sasusaku. Modern AU.


_It was so unique to find someone, that in this world, wanted to be alive._

.

.

.

Hazes of grey clouded the sky above. Abundant hails of water in the shape of bullets plummeted mercilessly at the black ridged roof tiles, ricocheting off the metallic frame atop the house. The raindrops were together a minuscule monsoon that flooded numerous miniature craters in the cemented terrain, as it water-logged through all the Earth it touched.

The wind elevated in a violent gale, gyrating in forlorn spirals, colliding with each other in destructive friction. A slamming door belted against the faded white slabs of the walls. The broken handle creaked, its screws liberated as they came loose, as it dropped to the solid dirt with a silent thud.

A loud grotesque scratching scythed along the metallic titanium of a silver Honda, creating a jagged scar across the abandoned vehicle. The door's slamming ceased, as the car veered, hoisted by the wind, skidding to catch the aged wood.

The front windshield had been shattered. Dozens of glass specks were scattered, as if they had been thrown from a violent impact in all directions. The Honda's bonnet was twisted; mashed into numerous razor sharp edges that stuck out, as if it had been pulverized by the invincible wall. The agitated mistral thrashed against the unharmed trunk of the Honda, threatening to lift it off its black tar-covered tires.

Soil was dispersed from the beige ledge of the building to the lion's share of dirt dumped in a heap, where the dead leaves and rose colored flowers of a once healthy hibiscus plant were now sprawled from a demolished bisque vase. Two airbags were disparaged in the front seats, acting as protectors to cushion the head of any unfortunate victims. The Honda, void of any life, had acquired an unorthodox thrashing from the rapidly vigorous cyclone.

It was almost flamboyant; in the theatrical sense that the vehicle's sustained damage was undeniably irreparable. One of the airbags had subsequently achieved its purpose. With the lock keeping the car door permanently sealed, and the car keys nowhere in sight, the window to the opposite of the driver's side had been rolled down almost fully.

The vehicle was abandoned; but the house was not.

A hushed whimpering ensued from within the house's interior. The landscape around the crash site was nothing but endless green fields, soaked grass being battered in the weather, with no visible animals. Those mammals were elsewhere- somewhere far away, stacked inside barns where they wouldn't be harmed by the storm. Warm enough only to be irritated and terrorized by the wind bashing against the sides of their refuge.

Inside the miniature cottage croft, a small infant could not be so prosperous. Huddled in a corner, underneath a wooden desk that provided additional asylum to the child's restless mind, the boy appeared to be around six or five.

 _"Don't argue with me. Run inside."_

He had been conflicted; his instinct adhered his feet to the ground, attempting to stubbornly mold himself there. Yet, it was his futile pleas to stay that made her kind onyx eyes soften. It was her plea that shook him. That made his inexperienced, vulnerable heart sting enough to surrender. Even though he was too young to fully comprehend what she was really saying.

His tiny pale hands were bruised purple, desperately grasping the car mirror, so the wind wouldn't steal him. She had begged him. It was something she had never done. Anguish ruled out his eyes as the perplexity did in hers. His eyes were just a smaller, less rounded version of hers.

 _"_ ** _Please_** _, Sasuke_."

Her words haunted his mind. The infant had given in to her wishes and scurried to the front door before the deathtrap their Honda had become could claim him. Before he entered, he looked back at her. As the gale shook the car, she smiled at him, but refused to come inside herself to comfort him. So here he was, trembling beneath an old blanket he found thrown to the side. His ribs stung, bruises certain to form just before the countless quantity of cuts and scratches disappeared. Sasuke almost sprung from his place when a large gust clashed against the wall from outside. His nimble fingers clung to the roots of his short, spiky raven-colored hair. Unknown to him, red was stained on a white jumper he wore, long since dried in.

But it was not his blood.

A putrescent stench permeated the air, wafting from the abhorrent sight. Dark crimson washed in with the pelleting rain. The wind had thrown her forcibly from the driver's seat. The previous eyes that looked so kind had turned cold, dead from the light. Long locks of raven hair cascaded across the dull road, some of it tied in knots caught in clots of red from a head injury.

Her ankle was crooked, the white matter of bone sticking out from where the joints met in her leg. Her skin was decaying; turning rotten and blue as slowly deteriorated from its ivory color. Her leg had been stuck in the car; If she could not get out safely, at least she had made her son do so.

It was his mother's blood.

.

.

.

.

Rivulets of the sun's dawn glared him down, effectively blinding him via a chintzy window that was stained from the dust-ridden Earth stuck to it, as though it had been hygienically unkempt from a protracted sense of time before the Honda skidded off road from black ice and the increased winds. For some sleep-induced moments, he forgot.

His pale hands, too small and dainty for a man, regretfully strained himself to escape the warming comforts of the battered and worn blanket he had just scarcely been restful in. Ankles weak and shaking, he bravely managed to steady himself enough to stand, ducking beneath the wood of his additional shelter. The room which had provided him its asylum without his pleading was nearly bare, void of any furniture beyond the rickety desk he had dwelled beneath.

It had been evening yesterday when he had shot the developing muscles in his legs to scamper inside, before the cyclone could fiercely upsurge to batter him like the devastated metal of the car such weather had razed. Now, however, the air was still. Sasuke could only but hear the thudding of his own pulse. And just as sudden, he already yearned to flee back into his corner beneath the thin material of a third-class duvet, to steepen there and remain a part the wall. Somewhere into the night, after hours of convulsing into himself and shivering, he had cried out for her.

That was when he remembered. It baffled the child to comprehend the intuitive motion that urged him to head outside, to throw his lillyputian-sized self back into the Frey of the possible dangers lurking outside. It dawned on him that he was alone. No one could protect him. No one else was around. Significantly, his strength was microscopic to a gale, as he had learned. Gravity couldn't always protect him either.

Narrow, gaunt veins shook in his hand. He also direly yearned to know. He couldn't be alone. Not when she had only ushered him inside yesterday. Perhaps she preferred the confines of the vehicle to protect her. The little Uchiha had always teased his Mother's silliness. She was strange. Closer to nature than the households that protected her, always. His father, on many bounteous occasions, had rolled back his eyes when speaking of her extreme protectiveness. That must have been why. Why she would usher him on inside, onyx pupils uncomprehending to his own, holding a smile that never reached those eyes of joy and kindness.

He knew, though. He didn't know what he knew, couldn't understand it, couldn't let it not baffle his vulnerable pitting stomach. He denied it. But, somehow, he knew it. Just that feeling. The one that had lurked since he last saw the giddy mother that conceived and loved her son. Her silliness. He felt empty, something numbing through his chest, though it hurt like a hardening nail pinning him to the cottage croft.

Tears welted at his eyes, a draft of frigid and iced goosebumps aching the bare visible hairs on his neck to stand- algid and horrified. The urge to succumb to his fear was very real, just to ease back into his corner and do nothing. But he had to do something.

He had to know.

His sneakers skimped across stained carpet, brushing the rim of black with the soles of his shoes. He wasn't walking; everything held him back. His knees were flaccid to push toward the ground, tempted to drop toward spindly weakening ankles and descend with gravity to the floor.

Gravity- his only friend, it seemed, as of the moment. Raven locks spun at the front, stunned by little more than a breeze, spooked. A breeze that could transform into something more monstrous, more robust. He had opened the door.

The stench was unforgiving. The buzzed wriggling of something small- dozens of creatures feasting. And, on that day, his eyes grew wide. On that day, Uchiha Sasuke's innocence was no more. His heart tainted, his eyes scorned. Silly mother, he had merely thought before he had stepped out. She'll be fine. He dropped to his knees, succumbing the fearful adrenaline he had been determined to give in to. And then, his flaccid knees dropped to the ground.

His temptation was absolute- succeeding to break the fear in his spindling ankles. For Gravity, his only friend, let the weakness soar limp throughout his entire body. Not caring of the cuts he gained when his chin hit rock bottom concrete, when all he could focus on was red.

 _"_ ** _Please_** _, Sasuke."_

The earthed stains on the window were not the dark stains on the concrete. An unrecognizable corpse was sprawled before him. Recognizable enough. Such things cannot be unseen. He couldn't bring himself to look away from the sight of the maggots that dived for her flesh, eagered and glad to be feeding on the rotting flesh of her limbs and her body.

Larva simply enjoying a meal, wormed up the graying bone that pierced from her ankle. From her dead skin, his haplessness pried at himself mentally. Emotionally, he was scarred. Physically, he could not tremble. His eardrums thundered, his taste grew metallic. Such things cannot be unseen. The sun that hit his back with warmth was cold. Only now, he became aware of his own jumper.

Not his blood. His mother's.

Only then, and only then, could he comprehend. His mother's eyes- kind and onyx. Obsidian and joyful. He would not remember her for the way she wished to be remembered by both her children especially, and everyone else. Fugaku, Itachi... they would. They didn't see what he saw. Could never feel his inevitable helplessness. His eyes forever widened, and his body forever frozen, unable to shed a tear. Because he could not unsee. Shrill, and deep. Pathetic, yet terrifying. It climbed from his toes to his crowned mass of raven hair. Simply, the undeniable. His lips gaped, then swallowed. And when he threw himself back, he threw himself forward. For his limbs to sting, so absolute, they tore apart from his body. For the hurling smash of his mentality to smack his head off the grey, no thought in his mind. For the hollering scream was his, wrenching his own throat to permeate silenced air.

.

.

.

.

Some days passed.

He awoke screaming. He always did.

First, his brow would sweat, and he grew paler. Then, he spoke of unintelligible things in his slumber. Of the wind's frantic bashing, rampaging the external walls of his shelter, trying to steal him. Of how he physically remained absent from its touch, yet it taunted him. Consumed him. Terrified him wholly.

A child's mind was fast to break. He was only six.

His brother would hold him, when he would wake believing he was still asleep- _this was too painful to be real_ \- and endure the wailing and struggling. He would endure it until their father woke up, scampering and cussing into the room and ushering Itachi away from Sasuke, taking the child into a suffocating hug. Fugaku then would converse one-sidedly, of less sentimental things, until the boy submitted to sleep.

He talked of simplistic things. Like films. Monsters inc, Shrek and Spirited Away were the main three titles Fugaku spoke of. Sasuke's favorites. Speaking of trivial things didn't distract a child long enough, and eventually Fugaku's luck was hapless to the vulnerabilities of multiple nights spent holding Sasuke, rocking him back and forth till he passed out from crying.

It broke Fugaku at first; he had never been particularly good with intimacy. He had never been the sole person to care for anyone. He was bad with words and worse with hugs. Paperwork he once found himself immersed in slowly decreased in his workload the less hours he took and the more he exhausted his heart as the sole provider and carer of two sons. It hurt the more he found himself adapting as he began to fill a mother's role.

Sasuke never remembered in the morning. Specialists called it a survival function in his brain to dissociate reality from memory, and diagnosed him with PTSD. As if he'd do anything to rid himself of the pain. They didn't separate him from people, in an attempt to distract him, encourage him to re-establish himself with familiar surroundings. They attempted trauma therapy, questioned Sasuke and took notes for analysis. At the time, Sasuke appeared stable, and even smiled, as if he hadn't suffered at all. As if he hadn't seen his mother's corpse.

At the time, Itachi was nine, and just barely understood.

.

.

.

.

The first instance of withdrawal symptoms came when they lowered her casket into the dirt.

Fugaku thought it best to withhold the funeral, with thoughts of his sons in mind when they each dropped a moon lily each and cast brown soil over her coffin. Mikoto had loved the flower. She said they were associated with birth in Greek lore, as well as purity and innocence.

Itachi and Sasuke gently released the flowers, unaware the flowers could bring her peace. Or perhaps a second chance at life, one in which her skin would wrinkle and her beauty would falter. So she could age old, and witness the lives of her grandchildren, so she could experience everything worthy and wasteful. That a husband would watch his wife wither entirely with a smile, in her sleep, at ninety.

There was the typical sympathies and cliched apologies and blessings. Itachi bared a front to receive them with pride for his mother, hoping she would watch proudly as he held back salty tears. Sasuke withdrew from everyone, disappearing from his father's sights. He didn't cry, not as many had expected him to.

Instead, he was found on the sight of a commotion. A girl screeching at the apex of her lungs, situated with her sat on the ground, her black dress muddied and her bruised lip bleeding. "I v-wis'... pl... playing n-nice!" The child of seven or eight explained, in between her shocked whimpers. She wasn't hurt badly, but whispers spread fast.

Fugaku asked everyone to stay clear of Sasuke while dealing with an enraged mother. "I know you lost your wife, and I sympathize for your family, but that did not give your son the right to punch my little girl!" In truth, Fugaku's ailing was replaced temporarily by gratified frustration as he gave the mother a sincere apology. He had been allowed to see his wife's body, after the wounds had been stitched up and all dirt was removed, but he hadn't been there. He hadn't been a child, with no previous experience of reality's cruelties, cold and malnourished inside an abandoned hut for three days, while Mikoto's body outside, wasting away.

"Dad," Itachi's voice came from behind him, unsure of himself. Fugaku turned to look at his son, a mini version of his beloved wife, red-puffed eyes and a quivering lip, looking to him for comfort.

"Mom is... really dead?"

Itachi knew. He didn't have to ask. He couldn't prevent himself though, when he selfishly tugged at the hem of Fugaku's black ironed shirt, as if he would rip off the fabric. And Fugaku did not answer. He instead just picked up his boy, letting the sniffling muffle into his funeral clothes, to hide his own silent tears from his eldest son, as he searched for the younger.

.

.

.

.

Fugaku had spent the day of the funeral with Itachi when they returned home. He sat at their dining table with his eldest, palms on his back, comforting Itachi as he sobbed into Fugaku's funeral clothes. Finally, truly understanding the implications of death. That it was just them now and that was all they got.

Fugaku had prepared for this. He'd once been emotionally null, so he'd read up on different psychology books, mostly on how to deal with grief and how to comfort. He now knew the baser things to say to someone else who was grieving, too. He had maintained eye contact with Itachi, whose eyes betrayed flooding emotion and soggy drying tears, kept a firm gentle hand on his shoulder and told him of the peace Mikoto was at now. Of the all the bad things she wouldn't have to endure ever again. _She would never ever be in pain again._

"And right here, in your heart," Fugaku motioned. "She's always there, right with you, even if you can't see her."

"I can see her."

Itachi and Fugaku turned to the boy who stood at the doorway, distancing himself from their closeness, and appeared to be both sallow and thin. "I always see Kaa-san," Sasuke repeated. Fugaku didn't know if he imagined the crack he heard in Sasuke's voice. The smallest one. The one he wanted to hear. For Sasuke's face betrayed no expression and his tone was monotonous. His tone had been monotonous for the entire journey home.

Fugaku had discovered Sasuke back at St. Rose, the church where Mikoto lay burried, after an hour of trying to find him. All the funeral goers had departed save for one woman who stayed behind to care for Itachi in Fugaku's near absence. She had insisted and he had thanked her gratefully.

Fugaku had discovered Sasuke at Mikoto's grave, lying atop the dirt, staring upwards into something perplexing and heart-wrenching from the way Fugaku saw him in that moment, disrespecting his mother's newly laid resting place. And Fugaku was unsure of what hurt more; the fact that his youngest was lying on top of his wife's grave, or the fact that when he saw that boy with a stranger's vacant eyes, he could have believed that his son was killed that night as well.

He was back looking at this stranger, standing in the doorway, his tiny hand on a mahogany frame, an awful gnawing at Fugaku's chest, with the face of his son.

.

.

.

.

 _Uchiha Mikoto_  
 _Tuesday, 1st June, 1969 - Friday, 18th October, 2002_

August was fast approaching. Soon the Summer would be a bygone, and School would flood with freshmen as the Fall began with a new year. Uchiha Mikoto's broken body now lay lifeless within an ashen gray coffin, entombed deep beneath the Earth in the graveyard of St. Rose Church, as it had been for twelve despondent years. The white marble of her furbished gravestone was smooth, her name delicately inscribed in the center, with three small roses modestly etched into the marble above her written identity.

Positioned with prodigious care upon the soil in front of the stone, was a white moon lily inside a simple but deficient black vase with a blue bow tied around it. She was thirty three when that morbid cyclone killed her. If the raven-haired humanitarian were still here, she would be dissimulating about her archaic senescence, though she would only be forty five.

Mikoto's physical maturity, when she still breathed, was always behind her adept mentality anyway. When she had endured the capricious era of adolescence, she was brazenly mistaken as a decade old lad by any who did not know of her. Though she had been a late bloomer, the rest of the females her age had already mellowed to all the beauty they would ever have.

Abruptly, a devastating mountain had been dropped onto him. Once a boy of six winters, now a near man of seventeen. He was taller; a cold facade blocked whatever thoughts executed through his head. His posture straight and his head held high in masculine pride. Shoulders strong and a muscular chest indicted infrequent and arduous hours at the gym. Sasuke had become an enigmatic and perplexing being in his dark fastidious and intractable ways of life. Even his open-minded ways of expression were lethargic at best.

His ankle sized dress boots were newly polished; from the spiked crown of his untamed hair to the delicate apex of his foot, he was dressed in black attire. Aside from the casual white t-shirt beneath a black leather jacket, his footwear, dungarees and wristwatch were all the same color. The Uchiha himself might as well have been a collage of shaded charcoal that contrasted to his pale ivory complexion.

He veered down onto his knees, clasping in his grip a soft brush, as he carefully rid the pristine marble of newly formed grit, being careful not to scour against the unscathed headstone. By now, one could call him an ingenious expert in cleaning marble. He had long ago marked a permanent mental note in his cerebrum to never use a wire brush, else he would end up damaging the stone face with multiple scratches, which would be religiously disrespectful to his departed mother. He also never used vinegar, or lemon, or literally anything soapy. As the calcium within the marble would dissolve with anything remotely acidic.

It was a quiet Saturday; the hours had rapidly elapsed and not so much as an inaudible pin had dropped around him. Usually, he came on his lonesome after school, or on the morning of a day there were no academic lessons.

Every day, without inadequacy, he had visited since her burial. Even when his family used to go on vacation, he stubbornly never left. The last time they attempted to usher him abroad was on his eleventh birthday, where he narrowed his eyes and blocked their forced smiles through years of suppressed pain and even let him choose the destination. He had declined. And Fugaku had always ended up cancelling.

Some people, most who had known Sasuke all their lives, whether from school or as acquaintances of the rather populous family, commented that the day Uchiha Mikoto's light expelled so did the childish innocence and audacious impishness in the pupils of her once glowing son. That the experience of seeing all that blood would have done the same to them, if they too had seen it.

That he held inside of him all the preserved anger that would one day explode like an indistinguishable masquerade of emotion fueled flames, releasing the child that screamed within to be freed. That he was the only one yet to have an emotional meltdown. That he would be better for it. None of them ever said it to his face, though, perhaps because they dared not to.

"Of course you would be here."

The youngest Uchiha didn't have to turn his head to recognize the voice of his elder brother. Uchiha Itachi had been nine when he became the pillar for a broken family.

A decade and a year later, he was at the start of his prime as a twenty one year old. Itachi was the only one who still attempted to treat him like he was the old Sasuke; like he wasn't impudent or selfish. As if he almost had some decent features to make up for the unlimited amount of flaws he carried within his hapless being.

"She's not coming back, Sasuke."

His brother spoke again when his own silence spoke volumes. His tone was sullen; a brooding gloom rung through his words, agonizing his own feeble heart more so than the words were meant for. Like her, Itachi had been blessed with the same raven locks their mother had. Like her, Itachi held the same intense, scorching warmth inside his obsidian eyes as their mother had.

Sasuke, once upon a time, had all of that too. He still did. Except that his eyes now resembled something much darker: an endless abyss into a world with no color and no recognition behind the word life.

"I know that even better than you do."

It was Sasuke who retorted. His cruel sentence spat virulence on his brother's empathetic tone, filled with nothing more than malevolence. Who was Itachi to understand the hopelessness a mere child had endured when he could do nothing but quiver, distraught from the horrific gale his mother's body lay in?

The same body now lay in a coffin, buried directly beneath their feet, dwindling away to disintegrated skeleton. With naught left to respond with but a disheartened sigh, Itachi glanced down to the younger, foolish brother on his knees. Knowing he wouldn't be able to come to his aid if he kept being shut out.


End file.
